The Rising Floor

Concepts that were once impossible are now considered trivial

Here’s something that nobody points out in educational debates: humanity has gotten dramatically smarter over history, even without substantial genetic changes.

Calculus is the clearest example. A few centuries ago, it was beyond human comprehension. Then only geniuses could grasp it. Now it’s standard material for high schoolers. The same pattern repeats throughout intellectual history: concepts that once stretched civilization’s greatest minds become trivial to ordinary people a few generations or centuries later.

Chess shows this too. The best chess player in history may or may not be the current world champion, but nobody seriously argues that the best 16th-century players could compete with today’s top players. We have substantially better conceptual tools, better ways of thinking about the game.

Civilization overall has improved conceptual technologies. Conceptual technologies allow for people to discover or invent an insight for the first time. Isaac Newton: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”¹ (See also: simultaneous discovery).

Conceptual technology also allows for improved pedagogy: Newton’s physics and calculus discoveries once were difficult to understand for the greatest geniuses of his age. Nowadays, between epsilon-delta limits, graphical intuitions, graphing calculators, and the sheer permeance of his ideas in the mainstream culture, learning Newtonian physics and calculus is a regular rite-of-passage for moderately bright high schoolers.

Photo by Declan Sun on Unsplash

While I find the “conceptual technology” handle the most useful, this is not the only angle that we can use to analyze modern successes, nor the only important factor. The accumulation of cognitive capital is another relevant angle. Another consideration is crystalized culture. Though in the past I’ve been skeptical of cultural evolution, I think reframing conceptual civilizational progress as “a culture’s crystallized intelligence” makes the concept click far more and make much more sense for me.

Modern technology, of course, also allows for greater cognitive scaffolding. Literacy, spreadsheets, and online search doesn’t just make me perform smarter. The extended brain I have (which includes these tools, and arguably is part of the definition of “me”) de facto just is smarter.²

Some worry we’ve traded away important capacities for these gains. Say geometric intuition, classical literacy, ineffable forms of taste. I doubt it. It’s suspicious that we see clear improvement everywhere we can measure, and supposed decline only where we can’t. It’s much more plausible that we’re just romanticizing the past.

The interesting question, then, isn’t what we’ve lost. Far more intriguing to consider is where this trajectory leads.

If conceptual intelligence keeps compounding, what will be trivially obvious to people a thousand years from now that we can barely grasp today? Will problems that seem impossibly difficult today: phenomenological consciousness, meta-philosophy, the Riemann hypothesis, perhaps even getting people on Twitter to understand basic theory of mind, one day become as intuitive as arithmetic?

We treat intelligence as relatively fixed. This may or may not be true on the timescales of years. But the historical record suggests that, especially on the timescale of generations and centuries, it’s more like technology: it accumulates, builds on itself, and compounds over time. The floor keeps rising.

1. Some people claim that Newton meant it as a dig at his contemporary and rival Robert Hooke, who was a dwarf. I don’t personally find it very plausible, the explanation seems “too clever by half.” Further, the semi-simultaneous discovery of calculus with Leibniz does suggest that regardless of whether Newton was sincere, his statement was correct.

2. And of course there are the more standard explanations for

a) increased individual intelligence over the last couple of centuries: better nutrition, reduced parasite load, and

b) greater access – the best geniuses (and normal people) of our generation are increasingly able to access the resources to reach their potential (or at least their potential possible given 21st century concepts and technologies), regardless of birth sex, ethnicity, or familial wealth. Far from 100% true, but much more true today than historically.